Panasonic says Intel Atom not up to snuff for its PCs
Japanese vendor not interested in netbooks
Japanese giant Panasonic has said no to netbooks: it's not going to make a Small, Cheap Computer. It's reasoning is that SCCs are consumer products and it's in the business of selling to, well, business.
Clearly it doesn't - for the moment - believe executives and mobile workers want ultra-compact laptops.
Given the battery life of your average SCC - poor, basically - Panasonic's evaluation is probably correct for now.
Never say never, we'd suggest - look at what Asus hopes to achive with the N10 notebook-not-netbook: build an Atom-based laptop that big business will buy into.
Pah! says Panasonic. Right now, Toshi Harada of Panasonic's Kobe factory told local reporters this week, "performance is too low to work with office documents or other applications".
Tell that to all the folk who use SCCs for just that - a lot of journos at shows, for instance. What we think the Panasonic comment really means is that performance is too low to work with Windows Vista. But who wants to work with Vista, anyway?
Netbooks and Mini-laptops Buyer's Guide
COMMENTS
In Soviet Russia
Hopefully someone will be able to make a good pun out of "Nyetbook"
The real reason
Panasonic don't want netbooks because there is little margin for profit in them silly.
In any case businesses buying computers go on features as the major consideration, not price. The IT bod buying the product drools over features and price is done by someone else.
Panasonic can't do that with its own netbook can it?
What people want
"Clearly it doesn't - for the moment - believe executives and mobile workers want ultra-compact laptops"
No, it just doesn't believe executives and mobile workers want cheaply constructed, appallingly slow ultra-compact laptops with pathetic battery life.
Sony and Lenovo make the kind of ultra-compact laptops the aforementioned group find usable.
"performance is too low to work with office documents or other applications"
The mind boggles, really.
What sort of hardcore 'office applications' require such an excess of processing power that an intel atom can't provide? Sure, there's always going to be power-hungry apps that you might want on your workstation (compilation, place and route, image processing... a few things that spring to mind), but 'editting a word document' or 'editting a spreadsheet' should not even being to approach the same power requirements.
Quite frankly, I blame everyone. The people who've worked on MS office since v6, and anyone who has anything to do with acrobat for a start.
Panasonic do not want to compete with themselves
If PHB's buy SCC's, they would not be buying high margin Panasonic status symbols.
